Some people are fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. This final 2009 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group.

1. If the word Sixburgh doesn't make you nauseous… It is never, EVER, a good thing when one NFL franchise has sole possession of the record for Most Super Bowls Won. Since 2005, there has been a very comfortable three-way tie for that crown between the Steelers, Cowboys, and 49ers. This was for the best. It meant one group of fans could not take all their Super Bowl titles and Lord them over you like complete fuckheads. Trust me, when the 49ers had more Super Bowl titles than anyone, you heard about it often. And now, you will hear it over and over again from asshole Steelers fans in their Hines Ward replica jerseys and hard hats. Simply show up to any Steelers game or bar wearing the colors of another team, and you will be subjected to any number of uninvited taunts that YOUR team does not have six Super Bowl rings, and that YOUR team is not the flagship franchise of the NFL, and that YOUR team is not family-owned and does everything the right way.

Worst of all is the notion that the Steelers somehow reflect the populace of their city by playing hard-nosed, blue collar football. THEY BROUGHT THEIR LUNCH PAILS TODAY, GANG! THEY'RE SO PITTSBURGHISH! This is the biggest steaming load of eviscerated shit I've ever heard. Nearly all the steel mills in that town are gone. Find me a Steelers fan who's an actual fucking steelworker, and I'll put a unicorn in your driveway. That town was repurposed ages ago as a center for tech, banking, and ketchup distribution. It is not a tough town. It's as yuppified as fucking Portland (Oregon or Maine, take your pick), only it's stuck in the center of Pennsyltucky and everyone there is fat and smells like sticky buns.

Worst of all, most Steelers fans can't even stand to live in that fucking town anymore. There are Steelers bars all over the nation because most Steelers fans worth a shit fled that sleepy den of hellish boredom ages ago. There's nothing to do in that town except be thankful you aren't in Cleveland. And that's if the Steelers fan you know even spent ANY time in Pittsburgh. The three Steelers fans I know all grew up in Maryland. Gee, I wonder why they gravitated to the Steelers? I wonder if wanting to be front-running dipshits at age five had anything to do with it. THIS MEANS YOU, APE! AND DJ GALLO! AND MY FRIEND KEVIN, WITH WHOM YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR! J'ACCUSE!

And with this sixth title, more bandwagon jumpers are on the way. Newly minted Steelers fans think they can get away with being carpetbaggers because the Steelers are so darn "lovable". WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG. Your team is not lovable, and you are fat, and I don't like you.

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2. Most annoying fans at the bar? Most annoying fans at the bar. You'd think Eagles fans would have this title all sewn up. You'd be incorrect. Stop by any bar on a Sunday afternoon this fall and you will be treated to a large number of Steelers shouting out pointless shit like, "FUCKING BIG BEN!" or "HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO!" or "THAT'S MY BOY, JAMES HARRISON!" It says something about a franchise when Terry Bradshaw is its most insightful representative. Steelers fans don't even bother to stop talking while they're eating. They'll just happily prattle one while chunks of fried cheese and chicken scraps simply fall out of their mouths. It's like being trapped in a bar with a five-month-old who has a pituitary problem.

And that's not even the male fans. Yes, say hello to the NFL's #1 favorite team among all women. And not just ANY women. I'm talking the loud, 300-lb., cock-blocking beastulas that are destined to one day drive retarded kids to school in the short bus. As annoying as loud fans are in the bar, they're even more annoying when they are fat, shrill women. An ugly sentiment, but true. Just one female Steelers fan in a bar is the irritant equivalent of a bachelorette party showing up and singing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" in unison.

3. Daulerio hates you, Pittsburgh. Steelers Nation, you will not find a fan in the editor of this site.

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AJ: I just think their six rings are overrated. They only won one legitimately, in my eyes, and that was against the Cardinals. The rest are greenies, steroids, steroids, greenies, refs. I think they're the most overrated sports dynasty in history.

Me: I like it. Your assertion is both spiteful and groundless.

AJ: Yes. And it's a shitty, shitty town. The best thing to come out of it, in my opinion, was Wonder Boys. I mean, even the governor of Pennsylvania hates Pittsburgh. That fucking airport is filled with more invalids and children than I've ever seen. They treat that people mover like it's a goddamn ferris wheel.

Me: AHAHAHAHA

AJ: And it smells like Arby's. The WHOLE fucking city smells like Arby's.

4. Somehow, they still find a way to bitch. Oh, boohoo. Neil O'Donnell cost you a Super Bowl. POOR FUCKING YOU. You should have seven titles! You're so deprived! No fanbase is more spoiled rotten than this one. Visit any Steelers message board and you will STILL find fans who don't think Ben Roethlisberger is a good QB. If the team shows any deficiency (offensive line), Steelers fan will concentrate solely on THAT aspect of the team, so that they might whine about it the whole year long. Oh no! My team isn't as flawless as I'd like it to be! DON'T YOU SYMPATHIZE? Nope. Not a lick.

5. REFS! FLUKY TITLES! SOFT SCHEDULE! COCK!

6. The Steel Curtain is the worst metaphor ever. They're curtains. They either open in the center, or they can be drawn upwards to allow you to pass through. That is the function of a curtain. It doesn't matter what material it's made from: steel, adamantium, chiffon. ALL CURTAINS ARE EASILY PENETRATED SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE THEY ARE DESIGNED THAT WAY. Call it the Steel Wall. Or the Steel Monolith. Call it something that connotes impenetrability. A curtain intimidates no one, retards.

7. A final SCREW YOU from the readers. JW:

Most people would probably look at the Steelers' organization with respect if it wasn't for their absolutely obnoxious fans. We know, we know…Cleveland sucks all the time, Cincinnati sucks most of the time, and Baltimore sucks half the time…save it. Just because you were cursed to be born in Pittsburgh and grew up with a team that built the Steel Curtain out of heeping doses of testosterone and bull semen, doesn't mean you're better than the rest of us degenerates born in the rust belt. You root for a winning team, but you had nothing to do with helping them win…yet somehow you think you're better than the rest of us.

Here's another secret…those terrible towels would be the gayest thing about Pittsburgh if it weren't for Kordell and all those actual steel workers.

Stay classy Pittsburgh...in the meant time; go fuck yourselves.

Graham:

1. Who's their running back? The Steelers can choose from the skinny fast guy who is always injured, or the slow 2nd year guy who's always injured, or Mewelde Moore.

2. The quarterback has bad judgment. Be it firing his skull off a car windshield without a helmet, or dipping his pen in some strange ink, nobody quite knows how to fuck up a season like Ben. Steeler fans will sit there and argue about how Ben is the greatest QB since Elway, while meanwhile the rest of the NFL fans sit there and watch Ben throw picks, fumble, fail to move the offense, and generally look like shit. He then will make one or two plays out of 60 the whole fucking game. Meanwhile, the defense constantly bails his ass out. Steelerfan: BEN YOU ARE AWESOME!!!!!!!!! If this guy played for the Chiefs, his name would be Tyler Thigpen.

3. Steeler fans. I've never seen a more arrogant fanbase that has less knowledge of the game. YAY BEN!!!!!!!!!!! (waving yellow towel) WE'RE THE BEST!!!!!!!!!! (singing some horribly gay song) KISS OUR 6 RINGS!!!!!!!!!!! (conveniently ignoring the 70s teams that were pumped so full of steroids that half of them are no longer with us) OUR PLAYERS ARE GREAT GUYS!!!!!!!!! (stupidly sitting there watching while Hines Ward cheap shots some poor guy, Santonio gets arrested, Ben gets sued and Joey Porter gets shot)

Anonymous:

Their fans are EVERYWHERE. No, seriously, everywhere. Like Starbucks locations or cockroaches. This is largely because their city is a trash pit, and anyone with any sense moves away at their earliest opportunity. To, oh, I don't know, Alaska. No matter where you go in this great nation, you're bound to not be able to throw a stick and hit some Steelers fans. (Hopefully it's a sharp stick.) Look at this list; there are ten Steelers bars in Alaska. I didn't know there were ten bars in total in Alaska. Although, now that I scroll down further, there are an awful lot of Buffalo Wild Wings locations listed as "Steelers bars." Come the fuck on.

Their colors are Black and Gold. So are the Pirates. So are the Penguins. Come on, you unimaginative fucks, there are literally hundreds of colors. The town looks like a fat, numbered bumblebee convention, all year round.

There's nothing like an 19-year-old reminiscing about the championships "we" won back when said 19-year-old was nothing more that a gleam in his unemployed, fat, coleslaw-on-a-sandwich-loving father's eye.

"One for the thumb." More like "stick a thumb in my ass while I beat off to old highlights of the Steel Curtain."

I can't believe they've won two Super Bowls with that Missing Link-looking, mouth-breathing, alleged rapist troglodyte as a quarterback.

Pat G.

Steelers fans whine about never getting any national attention probably more than any other fans do. This is because the Steelers play a rather boring style of football, like the Ravens also play. The Steelers play a low scoring defensive oriented style of football that is not particularly exciting to casual fans and doesn't yield a lot of fantasy points. No one else cares. Get over it. This is assuming this supposed lack of respect, coverage, or recognition even exists. Which I'm suspecting it doesn't since I'm pretty sure Troy Polamalu has appeared in roughly 457 commercials in the past 3 years.

The recent championships just give NBC a chance to show footage of fat women with 80s bangs shoving Primanti sandwiches into their gullets.

Joe W.

Their fans. And I'm not even talking about the chromosomally challenged towel-wavers who populate Heinz Field. These are your "Deniro and Walken in Deer Hunter" types who inhabit the purgatory of Western PA but never left the area except possibly for Vietnam and aren't actually bothering the rest of us. No, I'm talking about the Steeler fan near you who plasters the hideous black and gold stickers everywhere he can think of, from his front door to the barely-running jalopy parked in his front yard. This Steeler fan shares every sub-human, depraved trait of his confluence bretheren, but the difference is that he's actually at your stadium waving a yellow towel in your face while grinning like a crazed mongoloid. How he was able to scrape together enough change on his minimum wage salary to afford an NFL ticket or read a map well enough to find a stadium are questions that must remain unanswered. However, these people are a bane on civilized society and should be immediately rounded up and deported back to the from whence they came.

How and why did they leave in the first place? I have my theory. Much like the first amphibian crawled out of the primordial ooze and became a land dweller because it instinctively knew that there had to be something better out there, so fled the Pittsburghers from the hellhole of their birth. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this mass exodus managed to stir subconscious but strong pangs of guilt amongst the Pittsburgher (second only to hunger/gluttony but well above dignity or a desire for proper personal hygeine). In order to assuage this guilty conscience, he decided to latch on the one thing from this godforsaken shithole of a hometown that has ever met with any success whatsoever, and that would be the Pittsburgh Steelers. Yes, he supports the Steelers out of some sort of misbegotten belief that repping his hometown somehow excuses his abandonment of the fellow mouth-breathing troglodytes who he left behind. God forbid you'd ever see any of these Steeler superfans finding their way to a Pirates game...

Dave V.:

So many Pittsburgh fans are from Ohio, and they are the biggest bandwagon fans in the world. These troglodytes have never even been to Pennsylvania, and yet they adorn their overweight, uneducated bodies with gaudy yellow and black, and call themselves true Steeler fans.

Chazz:

Equally sad is the number of people who all of a sudden claimed to be "from" Pittsburgh as they pepper their speech with the "Stillers" and "Yinzes." Nine times out of 10 they live in a suburb of the city and before 2006 would rather have said they were from Philadelphia or
Islamabad before they copped to being from Pittsburgh.

Will M.:

I went to the Giants/Panthers preseason game (I'm a Panthers fan, fiancee's family have Giants season tickets and they didn't feel like sitting outside on a 90 degree night). For the entire first quarter (ie, the football that was remotely interesting) some asshat behind me was shouting "WOOOOOOOOOO SIXBURGH! GO PITTSBURGH STEELERS! STEELERS SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS! WOOOOOOOO!"

Needless to say, I wanted to stab him in the throat.

The other reason: A friend of mine is a big Pittsburgh sports fan. So he's had a good year, football and hockey wise.

However, he recently claims to have "given up on" the Pirates after years of bleeding black and blue, because they suck today. He started following the Cubs (a division rival? FUCK YOU!) and the Red Sox (FACK YOU!!!). Now, if he's willing to give up on a team he previously bled for, how serious can he be in his commitment to the Steelers? Fuck him and fuck my Steelers fan friend.

And finally, X-Ray:

I fucked a girl from Pittsburgh once. She was a Steelers fan. She was cockeyed and smelled like Rolling Rock and failure.

I think that's a fitting way to close out this series. Get your hate on, people. The NFL starts this week.